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TaSED is a dual-track initiative to delve into the design of
technology for sustainable development (technical track), and the
broader social, business, and political contexts that influence the
success of these designs (social track). In particular, we seek to
understand the underlying factors that determine the best practices
for the deployment of technologies, and for understanding their impact
on local societies, as well as the world as a whole.
Technology initiatives for development around the world encompass a
wide range of fields, from water resources engineering and
infrastructure building to more exploratory projects like Internet
kiosks advertising crop price information. How does one design these
projects? What factors in each community will be significant in any
given project? How can we design appropriate technologies, and
what is necessary to make sure that the use of these technologies is
economically and socially sustainable? What metrics should we be using
to evaluate these projects?
The objective of TaSED is to engage a cross-disciplinary community of
technologists and social scientists in dialogue about these questions.
We hope to create a forum where interested students at Berkeley can
collectively formulate an understanding of how technology can be
deployed in an economically sustainable manner, and to critically
examine development projects, including those being pursued by people
at Berkeley. To have our group discussions culminate in something
concrete, we also invite interested participants to co-author a
conceptual paper that discusses how sustainability can be integrated
into existing technology design practices.
This year (2005), we are adopting a more social format, with the
objective of building community, and creating time and space for
informal dialogue. Each month we will select a socially conscious and
developing regions oriented movie, and invite members to view and
discuss it together over dinner. For those members who are interested
in continuing the reading and discussion group, we are also
co-convening with the ict4d@sims for bi-weekly meetings on
papers discussing information and communications technology (ICT) for
development. We invite you to join our mailing list - t a s e d (a) y
a h o o g r o u p s . c o m - in order to receive announcements about
TaSED meetings and other relevant materials.
Some historical information on TaSED, and reading schedules from previous years are available at
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~mattkam/tased/.
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